Self-cleaning surfaces are desired for paints, construction materials, glass and windows, textiles, and more. Such self-cleaning coatings provide protection from dirt and wear and improve in certain circumstances the aesthetic qualities and lifetime of industrial and consumer articles thereby reducing the need for chemical detergents, labor and energy expenditure. In other instances there can also be a need to have a hydrophobic or superhydrobic coating as a protective mechanism against the damage of water, salt water or other such water based fluids. While varieties of materials and processes for artificial hydrophobic or superhydrophobic coatings, using methods such as chemical vapor deposition, layer-by-layer assembly and micro-patterning, have been reported, all of these methods and coatings require complicated application processes which are difficult to apply to large substrates. Therefore, there is a need to develop “self-cleaning” (where hydrophobic coatings along with water for instance can remove dirt/dust particles and not to be confused with oleophobic coatings) coatings and methods of applying self-cleaning coatings to any substrate, that are effective and do not change the transmittance property of substrates.